When is a cloud a cloud? The importance of self-service

In working with hundreds of customers around the globe on private and public cloud projects, I can safely say that the true measure of a cloud is now largely understood…

Elastic

Pooled Resources

Self-Service

Measured/Metered

I don’t want to bore you with a cloud history lesson and I don’t expect that to shock anyone but I do think it’s an important reminder for some about what our customers are building. We’ve been very focused on the self-service component of cloud over the past few months as we’ve seen a massive change in thinking about just what that means. Self-service for the first iteration of private cloud and even many public clouds was narrowly focused on packaging infrastructure (IaaS) in a simple way for technical users to consume.

Fast forward a few months and look deeper into the enterprise private cloud and there is now a clearer understanding of just how much impact “cloud” is having on IT. Cloud strategies are about more than just local or privately hosted IaaS and Paas, they are acknowledging and even embracing public clouds and considering all of the various SaaS and internal apps and workloads as part of an overall cloud strategy. Clouds are no longer just shadow IT and dev/test playgrounds but have become business-driven projects to drive agility across an entire organization.

Cloud orchestration solutions and the proper infrastructure have proven they can manage scale and elasticity and APIs can usually enable external systems to measure and meter. This leaves the last remaining piece of the puzzle to be how to deliver all of these services in a simple self-service manner to everyone in an organization. We are no longer talking about self-service cloud, it’s now self-service IT, or more commonly IT-as-a-Service. (here comes the product pitch…)

Working with customers, Citrix has evolved our CloudPortal Business Manager product into a platform for delivering anything-as-a-service. With the pending release of CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0, cloud builders can now deliver any cloud-based service through a single self-service catalog. In addition, those services can be custom packaged in a way that enables granular metering for billing, chargeback and showback. CPBM 2.0 is designed around an open architecture of SDKs and APIs to enable pre-packaged partner integrations (many coming soon), and to enable the inclusion of any best-of-breed third-party or in-house services as well. With this extensible platform, a cloud services strategy can go beyond IaaS to include applications, workloads and services that benefit an entire organization and deliver a level of agility that shifts the role of IT from gatekeeper to services broker.